When you're marketing a service, what you're really
marketing is yourself. You're marketing your expertise, your
reliability and your commitment to excellent service. So how can
you communicate that important of a message to prospects?

Marketing and branding guru Harry Beckwith went looking for the
answer to that question, and when he didn't find a book that
addressed the subject, he wrote one. The second in his Invisible
trilogy, The Invisible Touch: The Four Keys to Modern
Marketing (Warner Business, $21.95) covers four key concepts in
marketing service businesses: price, brand, packaging and
relationships, in addition to looking at such issues as market
research, the fallacies of marketing and the meaning of
satisfaction. We've asked Beckwith to share some of the
knowledge he's gleaned from being a best-selling author and
owner of his own branding consulting firm, Beckwith
Partners.

Entrepreneur.com: How is selling a service different than
selling a product?

Harry Beckwith: One huge difference is that people can
see a product and that means that they can evaluate what they see.
It's a tangible item so they can touch it. They can gain a lot
of information about what they assume to be the quality of the
product from simply inspecting it with their senses: their eyes,
their hands, their nose. But a service doesn't exist at the
time you buy it. It's just a promise that someone will do
something for you and you're going to have to pay for it. And
so that makes buyers of services, among other things, much less
certain of what they're buying and much more fearful. And so
helping them feel more certain and less fearful is one of the major
strategies you need to follow when successfully selling
services.

Entrepreneur.com: You spend time in the book pointing out
the limits of market research. Do you find businesses rely too much
on the findings of focus groups and surveys? Where should they be
focusing their efforts?

Beckwith: I think most companies could benefit from
getting more information about their customers, and there are some
ways that work much more effectively [to gather that information]
than others. Focus groups are one method I've found that
doesn't work well at all. You really want to engage in
prolonged conversations with representative prospects who can
provide insight into why they do or they don't buy a service
[and you can't do that in focus groups].

I found that phone conversations are better at that for the same
reason that the Catholic Church decided that confessionals would
work if the priest was behind [an opaque partition] so the priest
couldn't see who was speaking. Because of that confidentiality,
the person would be much more open and honest about how he or she
felt and what he or she had done. The same is true about
interviewing people about products or services. If you get them all
in a room, they're going to say what they think the others want
to hear and what [they think] will make a favorable impression.
There are a number of dynamics at work. When there are just two of
you having a phone conversation, the other person is going to be a
lot more open and honest, and is going to help you get insight into
what you need to do to succeed.

Entrepreneur.com: Why isn't a goal of satisfying a
customer enough?

Beckwith: Because people themselves aren't satisfied
with being satisfied. [Americans] are a very restless group of
people who are hard to satisfy. And if we're merely satisfied,
we'll go for something more. The fact is there are businesses
out there who give us such a deep sense of something greater than
mere satisfaction, that [those companies] have become the benchmark
people need to meet.

When you get [satisfaction] reports in most companies--even
those that have dissatisfied customers--you'll tend to see
fairly high rates of reported satisfaction. A 92- to 94-percent
satisfaction rate is very common even among companies that are
having a great deal of trouble--again, because people in those
kinds of surveys really don't reveal themselves or expose all
the problems they're having. And that causes companies to get
very complacent. Everybody thinks they have incredibly satisfied
customers, but how many incredibly satisfying service experiences
do you really have in a day? You can have satisfactory ones, but
who wants satisfaction when there's something so much better
out there?

Entrepreneur.com: Why is it important to not be
considered a "good value," or as inexpensive?

Beckwith: It's presumed that your service is
ultimately priced at a rate people are willing to pay. There's
some reasonable correlation between what you're charging and
what you're offering to people because the market is willing to
pay for it. So value is really just the entry fee of getting into
any game.

So you've got to price your service at a value that is
reasonable. Now the questions are: What does your company really
do? How is it different? What unique benefit can your service
deliver to clients that the others can't? Value isn't a
differentiator; value is the cost of entering the game.

Having a lower price is a huge problem in service companies
because it connotes lower quality. I distinguish this from product
companies or retailers. If Wal-Mart or other retailers take items
that you can find in other places and offer them for less,
that's appealing. But if you're offering a root canal for
less or plastic surgery for less, what it tends to provoke in most
people is the fear that the root canal will hurt or your nose will
end up closer to your eyebrows than to the middle of your face. And
you don't want to do that.

Normally the satisfaction for the individuals involved in the
service [comes from having the service] done extraordinary well.
And if you do it extraordinarily well, you ought to be compensated
for it. What's the incentive in doing it to the level of
quality where you can charge less than anybody else? I don't
think you can find that very inspiring: "We're number six,
but we charge less." That's not a very powerful rallying
cry.

Entrepreneur.com: Why is a brand just as important for a
service company as it is for a product company?

Beckwith: Because the brand is really one of the few
tangible manifestations of or communicators for what the service is
or does. Perhaps the best example is the "good hands" of
Allstate. That symbol and branding help people understand and feel
something about insurance. What is insurance, after all? Is it a
policy or what? Not at all. It's "good hands" or
"solid as a [Prudential] rock." In fact, if you look at
insurance companies, you'll find historically they were the
first to perceive the power of branding because they may provide
the ultimate invisible product--insurance.

Entrepreneur.com: How are service companies affected by
beauty and packaging?

Beckwith: The environment and the package you surround
the experience with or that you put into your printed materials or
advertisements does so much to suggest what the quality is. There
are so few ways you have to really express your quality, and your
package becomes one of the few tools you have. And people know that
from the experience of going to restaurants. Restaurants with a
wonderful package and ambiance tend to be a great deal more popular
than many of the restaurants that serve fabulous food. And
that's because for the most part, in choosing a restaurant,
people opt for the packaging because they aren't really that
good at discriminating between tastes. And so the package, you
could argue, is more important for services than for products
because products themselves have a visual identity. They have a
package. The product itself is a package.

Entrepreneur.com: You list eight keys to lasting
relationships in the last section of your book. What is one of the
most important keys?

Beckwith: The idea of sacrifice. We don't realize our
clients feel much more at risk in their relationships with us than
we do. They've risked time and money and even the chance that
something might go terribly wrong. So it becomes important for
service providers to recognize that in business relationships, just
as in personal relationships, occasional sacrifices are enormous
protection against the inevitable mistakes you'll make.

Sacrifices that you make, more than anything else, signify to
your client that they're really important to you. And I
maintain that ultimately what's most important in a lasting
service relationship is the client's sense that they're
important to you. If they feel they're important to you,
they'll put up with any number of what you would consider
product defects, if it were a product. If they don't feel
important, you have a very, very short leash and in fact, they will
interpret your first mistake as confirming what they feared: that
they're not really important to you. And they'll take their
business someplace else.